Thursday, April 2, 2009

TURF'S UP

I think the term food-porn or gastro-porn started as a way of sneering at the kind of food writing and food photography that’s so excessive and perfected that it makes you drool, but also makes you feel inadequate and dissatisfied with your own humble, ordinary eating life.

Recently I saw Rachel Ray referred to as the Queen of Food Porn, and this was related to those supposedly sexy, racy, daring pictures that were taken of her for FHM magazine.

If anybody really finds this stuff sexy, racy or daring they must have led very sheltered lives indeed, though certainly the idea of women cooking in high heels has its appeal.

But there’s another kind of food porn, which is actual porn in which people have sex while coating themselves in edible glop; c.f. Carolee Schneeman, though of course she was art rather than porn.

I don’t doubt that somebody somewhere finds this actual food porn arousing because somebody somewhere finds everything arousing but I suspect these people are few and far between. And I also suspect this stuff doesn’t arise out of anybody’s real sexual urges but rather out of a desperate attempt by the porno-industrial complex to come up with something that hasn’t been seen before.

There’s one particular strain that has women rubbing their feet in food, or crushing soft fruit, or coating their toes in chocolate syrup. And I few this really problematic. I mean, I like feet and I like food, but somehow this seems to give me less of what I want, rather than more; it’s way less than the sum of its parts.

But thinking about metaphors of food and sex, and thinking also about feet, I remembered two things. One, that in Cockney rhyming slang feet are known as plates of meat. And two, that in the world of foot fetishism, sucking toes is known as shrimping. There you have it: the perfect combination of turf and surf.